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The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him.

— Robert Penn Warren All the King's Men (1946)

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More quotes by Robert Penn Warren

Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

There are a lot of people who would make better citizens if they were content to be just negatively relevant.

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Penn Warren (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.